Oculus says all Zenimax claims are false, explains why Carmack quit

Last week Zenimax made a surprise move to claim a chunk of Oculus for itself by threatening to sue the company. From the outside it could easily be viewed as an opportunistic grab for cash following Oculus’ acquisition by Facebook, but Zenimax claims it’s nothing of the sort. Instead, Zenimax believes former employee John Carmack left with Zenimax IP in hand, and Oculus is now benefiting from that for free.

This week, Oculus has responded to the claims being made by Zenimax, and unsurprisingly says every last one of them is false.

What is clear for everyone to see is that John Carmack was working on virtual reality tech and talking to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey while still employed by Zenimax. However, Oculus has confirmed that there isn’t a single line of Zenimax code used in Oculus products and denies Carmack brought any IP with him.

Interestingly, Luckey did sign an NDA with Zenimax, which it seems Zenimax is using as part of its claims against the company. However, Oculus says this is Zenimax misstating “the purpose and language” of their own NDA.

Oculus also used this response as an opportunity to clarify why Carmack decided to leave Zenimax, and it was down to his interest in virtual reality. Apparently Carmack was prevented from working on VR in August 2013 and all investment in the tech was stopped. The work done to bring VR support to Doom 3 BFG was also shelved, which you can understand would have upset Carmack immensely.

There is clearly no love lost between these two companies. Oculus’ response ends by pointing out Zenimax didn’t claim any Oculus IP or tech as their own until after the Facebook acquisition was announced. If source code was stolen, Oculus wants to know why Zenimax hasn’t provided evidence of this seeing as the full source code is available online at the Oculus developer site.

My guess is that we are going to see these two companies go to court, and unless Zenimax has concrete proof Carmack and Oculus is using their tech, it’s going to be a very expensive case for the company where they could easily walk away with nothing.